Why is feminist research carried out in international relations (IR)? What are the methodologies and methods that have been developed in order to carry out this research? Feminist Methodologies for International Relations offers students and scholars of IR, feminism, and global politics practical insight into the innovative methodologies and methods that have been developed - or adapted from other disciplinary contexts - in order to do feminist research for IR. Both timely and timeless, this volume makes a diverse range of feminist methodological reflections wholly accessible. Each of the twelve contributors discusses aspects of the relationships between ontology, epistemology, methodology, and method, and how they inform and shape their research. This important and original contribution to the field will both guide and stimulate new thinking.

Feminist International Relations scholarship in the United States recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over those years, feminist researchers have made substantial progress concerning the question of how gender matters in global politics, global economics, and global culture. The progress has been noted both in the academic field of international relations and, increasingly, in the policy world. Celebrating these achievements, this book constructs conversations about the history, present state of, and future of feminist International Relations as a field across subfields of IR, continents, and generations of scholars. Providing an overview and assessment of what it means to "gender" IR in the 21st century, the volume has a unique format: it features a series of intellectual conversations, presenting cutting-edge research in the field, with provocative comments from senior scholars. It examines issues including global governance, the United Nations, war, peace, security, science, beauty, and human rights and addresses key questions including: What does viewing the diverse problems of global politics through gendered lenses look like in the 21st Century? How do feminisms accommodate differences in culture, race, and religion? How do feminist theoretical and policy analyses fit together? These conversations about feminist IR are accessible to non-specialist audiences and will be of interest to students and scholars of Gender Studies, Feminist Politics and International Relations.

This extremely innovative interdisciplinary text guides the reader through the research process from research design through to analysis and presentation while at the same time introducing the range of debates, challenges and tools that feminists use in their research around the world.

This book explores women’s militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women ‘do’ in wars. In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as ‘politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women’s identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them. The case studies discussed in the book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women’s roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women’s roles and experiences within them. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.

Political leadership has made a comeback. It was studied intensively not only by political scientists but also by political sociologists and psychologists, Sovietologists, political anthropologists, and by scholars in comparative and development studies from the 1940s to the 1970s. Thereafter, the field lost its way with the rise of structuralism, neo-institutionalism, and rational choice approaches to the study of politics, government, and governance. Recently, however, students of politics have returned to studying the role of individual leaders and the exercise of leadership to explain political outcomes. The list of topics is nigh endless: elections, conflict management, public policy, government popularity, development, governance networks, and regional integration. In the media age, leaders are presented and stage-managed—spun—as the solution to almost every social problem. Through the mass media and the Internet, citizens and professional observers follow the rise, impact, and fall of senior political officeholders at closer quarters than ever before. This Handbook encapsulates the resurgence by asking, where are we today? It orders the multidisciplinary field by identifying the distinct and distinctive contributions of the disciplines. It meets the urgent need to take stock. It brings together scholars from around the world, encouraging a comparative perspective, to provide a comprehensive coverage of all the major disciplines, methods, and regions. It showcases both the normative and empirical traditions in political leadership studies, and juxtaposes behavioural, institutional, and interpretive approaches. It covers formal, office-based as well as informal, emergent political leadership, and in both democratic and undemocratic polities.

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity. Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling. The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations.

Forging New Conventional Wisdom Beyond International Policing: Learning from Complex, Political Realities provides an innovative perspective in the field by conceptualizing international policing as part of a much broader system of peace and capacity development initiatives. Authors Bryn Hughes, Charles T. Hunt, and Jodie Curth-Bibb provide a thorough analysis of the current problems in the field, and subsequently offer a convincing argument for a new, post-Weberian approach.

Exceptionally clear and well-written chapters provide engaging discussions of the methods of accessing, generating, and analyzing social science data, using methods ranging from reflexive historical analysis to critical ethnography. Reflecting on their own research experiences, the contributors offer an inside, applied perspective on how research topics, evidence, and methods intertwine to produce knowledge in the social sciences.

Donna Seto investigates why children born of wartime sexual violence are rarely included in post-conflict processes of reconciliation and recovery. The focus on children born of wartime sexual violence questions the framework of understanding war and recognizes that certain individuals are often forgotten or neglected. This book considers how children are neglected sites for the reproduction of global norms. It approaches this topic through an interdisciplinary perspective that questions how silence surrounding the issue of wartime sexual violence has prevented justice for children born of war from being achieved. In considering this, Seto examines how the theories and practices of mainstream International Relations (IR) can silence the experiences of war rape survivors and children born of wartime sexual violence and explores the theoretical frameworks within IR and the institutional structures that uphold protection regimes for children and women.

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective. Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general. Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)